Lens on Life private view at the Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins.

Lens on Life private view at the Lethaby Gallery, Central Saint Martins.

Lens On Life, an exhibition curated by Marina Wallace included artists Rob Kesseler, Lucy + Jorge Orta, Ackroyd & Harvey and choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh. The exhibition was aimed at disseminating the scientific knowledge acquired during the five years of MitoSys (2010-2015), a project realised with the support of the European Union under its seventh framework program (FP7) and inclusion of the artists was pivotal in the project receiving EU funding.

MitoSys was coordinated by the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna. Internationally leading biologists, mathematicians, biochemists and biophysicists working at thirteen research institutes including the Department of Biochemistry in Oxford, the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, have collaborated to reveal how genes and proteins orchestrate mitosis in human cells.

The exhibition emerges from a dialogue, established between artists and scientists, concerning one of the fundamental mechanisms of human life – mitosis. Lens On life is a project strongly rooted within the field of art and science. It offered a novel take on mitosis and human cell division through historical and contemporary references and an imaginative interpretation by the artists involved.

The artists met with scientists from the MitoSys consortium –Tony Hyman, Melina Schuh, Jan-Michael Peters and Kim Nasmyth. Through visits to the scientific laboratories and the artists’ studios, artists and scientists established a common territory, made of images and metaphors, to develop an open and enduring dialogue that was captured by the film maker Natasha Serlin to create the film Meetings of Minds.